4-step positioning framework for B2B companies

Positioning (first) and Offer (second) are what actually make someone decide to work with your company or not.

You can have the best sales teams and do the best marketing ever, if your positioning is bad, you’ll struggle with converting.

Oh, and also if your positioning is bad you’ll most likely enter a pricing battle where only the cheapest will win.

Pretty sure you don’t want this.

I put together an easy, but very effective framework to help you define your positioning.

It’s the same approach we’re using at Demand Hive when building a Growth Strategy for our clients.

Step 1 – Category:

First, it’s important to understand and define exactly in which category your business fits the best.

In 99% of the cases, we’re using at Demand Hive the following 2 categories:

• Thought Leader
• Service Provider

The Thought Leader positioning fits the best companies that don’t have a very specific target customer, but have an “unfair advantage”.

The “Hire the top 3% freelance talent” is a real one, extracted from Toptal’s homepage.

They don’t have a very specific target market due to the specific nature of the business.

But they have an unfair advantage – the fact they have a very rigorous screening process and they accept only the top 3% of freelance talent.

And that’s how they ended up with this message.

Btw, your company doesn’t need to be at Toptal’s level to use this type of positioning.

We had to use a similar positioning a couple of months ago for a development company and they didn’t have 200+ million in annual revenue as Toptal does.

Yet, we managed to identify an unfair advantage and position the company accordingly because the service provider positioning didn’t suit them.

The Service Provider positioning is perfect for companies that focus on a specific niche or provide a specific type of service.

“We help X do Y” is the most common example to understand the concept, but it can be definitely used in several ways.

If you have a clear X (who), and/or a clear Y (what), then the service provider positioning can be the way for your company.

This type of positioning is suitable for most of the business and it’s easier to implement than Thought Leader.

Step 2 – Messaging:

After you manage to decide which category is the best, you can start crafting messages that resonate the most with your audience’s problems and desired outcomes.

This definitely requires a deep understanding of your customers, that’s why we always recommend starting with foundational client research before doing any marketing work.

Defining these messages is crucial for the next step, where you have to craft your value proposition.

Step 3 – Value Proposition:

Value Proposition should be your #1 weapon when doing any marketing or sales activities.

Basically all the work you have to do before is to lead you to your value proposition.

Based on the messages created before – which again, should be very correlated with your ideal customer profile, you should craft your value proposition.

Usually, it’s a mix of several ideas, concepts, and wording.

Step 4 – Strategic Keyword Identification:

One issue I always saw (even done by consultants or agencies) is thinking that the process is over after you have your value proposition.

Well, if we think only about the value proposition, yes, it’s kind of over, because you have the result.

But if we focus on the bigger picture, which is positioning, there is another important step. And that’s Strategic Keyword Identification.

You have to extract the most relevant keywords from your messages and re-use them in your copy.

That’s how you will actually manage to position your company accordingly.

There will be a 360° communication focused on the same concept, not only a sentence on a homepage.

As I mentioned, these are exactly the steps we follow at Demand Hive to craft the positioning of our clients.

This should be done before doing any marketing or sales activities – which may not bring results due to this.

Because bad positioning will most likely go to a pricing battle where the cheapest one will win.

Mostly because potential customers will not see any value in what you’re doing and you’ll be “just another company”.